St. Mary’s Episcopal Church

In our Gospel today we are introduced to the character Nicodemus. Nicodemus was a wealthy, well respected member of the community. He was also considered to be a leader among the Jews. He had been hearing about this Jesus guy and was intrigued. He had some questions, and so he goes to Jesus to try and get his questions answered.

The Gospel says he went in “the dark of night”, which could be because he wanted secrecy. He might also be concerned that he would lose his reputation if he ends up following Jesus. John’s is also a highly metaphorical Gospel, and when he talks about darkness and light there is usually a deeper meaning. The darkness and night could also represent confusion in Nicodemus’s mind about what is going on. But he is interested, and so goes down in the dark of night, lurking in the shadows, and asks Jesus some questions. Jesus gives answers, and there is some back and forth. I get the sense in this Gospel that Nicodemus probably left a little disappointed, that his questions were not as clearly answered as he would have liked. If this was the end of Nicodemus’s story, it would be easy to say that he had just been a foil for Jesus’s teachings. There are a lot of great teachings in this section of the Gospel: For God so love the world that He gave his only begotten Son; being born anew with water and the Holy Spirit. It would be easy to think Nicodemus was just a foil to get these teachings out, but Nicodemus shows up again in the Gospel.

The next time he shows up is when Jesus is in Jerusalem for the Festival of the Booths. Jesus has been getting a lot more people around him. He has been going to the Temple to teach during the day, and the religious leaders, of which Nicodemus is one, are getting upset with Jesus. They think he is committing blasphemy, and some are calling for him to be killed. Nicodemus is there for one of these conversations with other leaders who are figuring out ways to arrest Jesus, but have been unsuccessful. Nicodemus tips his toe in the water of what it might mean to defend Jesus. He doe not give a full-throttle defense of Jesus. He does not say I am following him, or yes, he is the Messiah, or yes he is the Son of God. He asks if Jesus should not have a trial first. Shouldn’t he be given his due process before we execute him? Nicodemus puts forth a very basic, simple defense. Perhaps he is testing the waters as to what would happen if he came out in full support of Jesus.

Nicodemus gets a lot of push-back from his friends, clearly showing that if Nicodemus had gone to see Jesus in the light of day, he would have been shunned by his friends. He might have lost his position in the community. This is the end of the second story of Nicodemus.

Nicodemus comes a third time in the Gospel, at the end of Jesus’s life at the crucifixion, after Jesus has died. Remember that almost all of Jesus’s friends had abandoned him, but there are a few who don’t. The women don’t abandon Jesus, the beloved Disciple is at the foot of the cross, and there are two more men, Joseph of Arimathea, and Nicodemus. He is there when almost every else has abandoned Jesus, and with Joseph they take his body and bury it. Nicodemus is the one who provides the oils and perfumes and spices, about 100 pounds of them. This is a big investment that he is making in caring for Jesus’s body. They are hurrying to do this before it gets dark. The first time Nicodemus comes to Jesus it is in the dark, and here we have Nicodemus in the light where everyone can see that he is by Jesus’s side.

There is an arc in the Gospel of Nicodemus moving from wondering and questions, lurking in shadows, to dipping his toe in the water, to having the courage to be there by his side when everyone else says Jesus is a criminal. It is a remarkable transformation that Nicodemus has over the course of the Gospel. Tradition tells us Nicodemus went on to be a follower of Jesus who was ultimately martyred for the faith. Many churches and denominations throughout the world have a Feast Day for Nicodemus in August.

This transformation is interesting when we put it in contrast to the conversion stories of other Disciples. The stories that we heard during Epiphany, of people like Peter and Andrew and Nathaniel. Peter is fishing, and Jesus says come and follow me. Peter drops everything, leaves his home, leaves his family, leaves his fishing and follows Jesus, just like that. Andrew does much the same thing. When Nathaniel first hears about Jesus he has some questions, but as soon as he meets Jesus, that is all put aside. He is there, following Jesus. We might also think of St. Paul on the road to Damascus, the blinding light moment that made him turn his entire life around. These are the standard conversion stories that come to mind when we think of conversion stories of those who became followers of Jesus.

But Nicodemus offers us a different model of how some come to the faith. Not one with blinding lights, not one with a sudden transformation, but one that has questions and wonderings and doubts. It is a slow transformation of the heart and mind and soul that eventually gets there when it matters most.

If you have had that kind of blinding light road to Damascus moment, that is wonderful. That is fantastic. But if you haven’t, that is also wonderful and fantastic. It is not the only way to have faith. I have talked to many people over the years who have had those great transformative, epiphany mountaintop moments of faith, but I have talked to more over the years whose faith has come slower and more questioning. Sometimes there is an insecurity in this process that people have expressed privately to me. I think Nicodemus is a good model for those who have that experience. I am not saying one is better than the other, but I will point out that Peter abandoned Jesus and denied him three times. Nicodemus, as slow as it might have been, had the courage to be there when it really mattered.

Sometimes I think of Nicodemus as the first Episcopalian, because I know many of you have faith like Nicodemus. You have questions, you have wonderings, you lurk in the shadows of the back pew for years, sneak in and out. But you know what? It is meet and right. It is good because you are here. Anglican spirituality is not one that has put a strong emphasis on those big flashy moments. People have them, don’t get me wrong, and they are good. We spent an entire season of Epiphany celebrating those big flashy moments. But Anglicanism is a spirituality that puts its energy on the slower transformative process. It is one that is not trying to look for the flashy conversion. We are not going to have you come up here and give your testimony about when you came to follow Jesus. This is a tradition that says week in and week out, year in and year out we try to draw closer to Jesus. We try and learn more, bringing all of our questions, all of our wonderings, all of our worries and skepticisms to Jesus. We invite Jesus to answer them, and try slowly to come closer. We try slowly to become one with Christ.

During this Lenten season, my friends, I invite you to take this time to draw closer to God. Take another step, bring another question, engage in another practice that might nourish your soul. You might not necessarily get there all the way, but this is OK. You can try again next year. We just keep at this, bit by bit, bringing our whole selves to Christ, asking for that transformation in the way of love that He came to show us. Draw closer to that way, draw closer to Christ.

AMEN

Perhaps like you, I got smudged this last Wednesday.

The 18th, as you may recall, was Ash Wednesday, the first day in the season of Lent. It’s a day that dares us think about this thing called life, but also about this thing called death – a day in which we are reminded of the dust from which we were created and the dust to which we shall return. Perhaps more than anything, though, it’s a day that reminds us of our humanness, that in the midst of being real, fleshy, messy human beings, a need for the Holy still exists. Maybe that’s why, for a whole lot of folks, the Lenten journey becomes one of turning around and changing directions and sometimes even showing a little repentance too.

But on Wednesday, just as I got smudged, I also did a fair amount of smudging, at a local hospital no less.

Over the last five months, I’ve spent every Tuesday and Friday, and this last week, Wednesday, earning clinical hours at a hospital outside of Oakland, California, where I live. We called ourselves chaplain interns, for ours was a CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education) unit to complete, some for purposes of ordination, some because they want to be hospital chaplains when they grew up, some because they just wanted the 20-hour-a-week volunteer experience.

And I’ll tell you what, Ash Wednesday hit differently this year, perhaps because life and death and the stark reality of what it means to find a home in a human body couldn’t be avoided. To patients and babies, families and staff, I looked them in the eyes and invited them to take a deep breath and think about this thing called life. To all of them, including those who had only been breathing for less than 24 hours and to those who only had another 24 hours left to breathe, I put a thumb to forehead and said, “Remember you are God’s beloved dust, and to God’s beloved dust you shall return.”

It was beautiful and raw and holy and precious and haunting, in so many different ways – the stark reality of humanness more real than ever before.

Now, lest you think I’m simply offering another Ash Wednesday reflection instead of a sermon on the first Sunday in Lent, hold those initial musings for a moment as we return to this morning’s Gospel reading – because in Matthew 4, the humanity of Jesus, and subsequently, the dichotomy of life and death and then of two things both being true at once, takes center stage.

Perhaps the passage is familiar to you: the Spirit leads Jesus into the wilderness to be tested by the devil. For 40 days and nights the God-man does not eat. Afterward, Matthew notes, he is quite famished. Well, yes, of course the Son of Man is famished, and at the end of his strength – at the end of nearly seven weeks, as one writer notes, he feels “socially alone and friendless … spiritually struggling to hang onto his identity as the glow of his baptism recedes into a hazy, pre-wilderness past.”1 Jesus, the human, the man, is in a state of vulnerability, and it is in such a state that the tempter tries to pull him away from his belovedness, his vocation, his identity – because prior to this encounter in the wilderness, Jesus had been baptized by his cousin, John the Baptist. A voice from heaven had said, “This is my son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.”2 Even in the wilderness, Jesus knew who he was – that he was God’s beloved son – and still, he was at the end of his rope physically, spiritually, socially.

As one theologian says, “Is it no accident that Jesus ends up in the wilderness after his baptism,”3 for it is here that like bait thrown to a hungry animal and the devil tosses out a number of “if” statements: “If you are the Son of God, command these stones to become loaves of bread.” “If you are the Son of God, throw yourself down, for it is written, ‘He will command his angels concerning you.’” “All these I will give you, if you will fall down and worship me.” To each of these temptations, Jesus quotes the ancient words written on his heart; he is taken from one location to another and to another still. It is not until after the third, unsuccessful “iffy” attempt, that the devil flees from him and a flock of angels swoop in.

Now, it’s often at this point in the reading that I can find myself utterly grateful: well, thank God, God, you got through that utterly human obstacle and can go back to being your full God self now. Perhaps this stems from the tradition in which I was raised, a tradition that sometimes seems far from the smells and bells of the Episcopal Church. There, we tended to want our Jesus human …but not too human.4 We were fine with him experiencing his human side for a little while there, but couldn’t he just get back to turning water into wine and calming the storms and healing the sick already? Couldn’t he get back to doing the really real God stuff? There, we called Jesus, “God in the bod, 100% God and 100% man.” His was a math equation we didn’t always know how to explain, a story problem that still somehow always seemed to err on the side of divinity when all was said and done.

But if this reading and the season of Lent and a day marked by smudged ashes on foreheads have anything to show us, perhaps we are invited to “grapple with the appalling messiness of humanity,”5 both of Jesus and of ourselves, just a little while longer.

What are we to say of our human selves that “can be loved and hungry at the same time,” that “can hope and hurt at the same time”? What can we say of a “trust that when God nourishes, it won’t be by magic?”6

Calling yourself a Christian, or more specifically to our context, an Episcopalian, doesn’t mean that you get a holy get-out-of-jail-free card, that bad things aren’t then going to happen to you now that you have accepted the cloak of belovedness placed upon your shoulders. Wilderness is still going to come into our lives – to us and to those we love, to our neighbors here in Eugene, but also halfway across the country in Minneapolis and in other cities here in the U.S. affected by a surge of federal detentions and deportations, and around the world in countries like Sudan, Ukraine, Myanmar, and Gaza where war is ongoing.

Perhaps the invitation in these inevitable wilderness places, during this season of Lent when we confront life face-on and “embrace all that it means to be human,” is to chew on what it means to be “human and hungry, human and vulnerable, human and beloved,”7 at the very same time. We think of Emmanuel, God With Us, who is “with you always, even to the end of the age,”8 who “has already gone ahead of his followers, even to the most forsaken places of the wilderness,”9 even here, even now.

As writer Debie Thomas says of this tension, and perhaps of the invitation that arises from this passage specifically, “we can be beloved and uncomfortable at the same time. We can be beloved and unsafe at the same time. [Because] In the wilderness, the love that survives is flinty, not soft. Salvific, not sentimental. [And} learning to trust it takes time.”10

So learning to trust we will, as we cling to our identities as beloved children of God, beside and through and with one another, in this holy communion of saints.

Amen.

[1] Debie Thomas, Journey With Jesus: https://www.journeywithjesus.net/essays/2541-tempted

[2] Matthew 3:17

[3] Audrey West, Working Preacher: https://www.workingpreacher.org/commentaries/revised-common-lectionary/first-sunday-in-lent/commentary-on-matthew-41-11-3

[4] Thomas

[5] Thomas

[6] Thomas

[7] Thomas

[8] Matthew 28:20

[9] West

[10] Thomas

Let us pray: Come Holy Spirit and shine your light into our hearts today. In the name of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, One God. Amen.

Two Sundays ago Bingham spoke to us about the theme of light that runs throughout the scriptures. From John’s Gospel:

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came into being through him, and without him not one thing came into being. What has come into being in him was life, and the life was the LIGHT of all people. The LIGHT shines in the darkness, and the darkness did not overcome it. There was a man sent from God whose name was John. He came as a witness to testify to the LIGHT, so that all might believe through him. He himself was not the LIGHT but he came to testify to the LIGHT. The TRUE LIGHT which enlightens everyone, was coming into the world” (John 1:1-9). In Advent we prepare for the coming of the light and at Christmas we rejoice that the light has come. In Epiphany the magi are guided by the star to discover the light of God come into our world. Throughout this season of Epiphany, we see revelations of the light of the world through Jesus’ baptism where the Holy Spirit descends and God claims Jesus declaring him beloved, at the wedding feast in Cana we see the light of the world in the first miracle, through Jesus’ teachings that we heard last week in the blessings, not as the world sees blessings, but as Jesus declares the radical new world order of God’s blessing and care for the least, the last and the lost. And if you recall, Bingham gave us a preview of what was to come from Jesus and the light, how Jesus would instruct us on how to be light bearers in our world today.

Here we are this Sunday where Jesus tells us to be salt and light. “You are the light of the world.” We too are light as we seek to follow Jesus, to receive, shine and share that divine light in our world. Jesus tells us and shows us how we are to be light, to shine and illuminate our world today. “Let you light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to God.”

Our world is FULL of darkness right now. We are living in a time where it is hard to find, or shine light. There is darkness in our personal lives: family members struggling with substance use disorder, relationships failing, crumbling, loss of jobs and medical benefits, ongoing battles with chronic pain, teenagers overwhelmed with anxiety, friends, good friends, active and full-of- life parish members who receive cancer diagnoses, rapidly deteriorate and die too soon, too quickly, Latino parishioners afraid to come to church because of ICE, teenagers worried about losing moms and dads to detention and deportation, political leaders disregarding the dignity of human beings and turning to racist tropes, and on, and on, and on. Our world is dark. There is not denying it.

And yet, we are called to be light, to shine the light of Christ in our world today.

As God spoke to the people of Isaiah’s time, God speaks to us. How DO we shine? How CAN we shine? What are we to do? First, remember always that the smallest of lights dispels darkness and that together, together, our light will grow and grow and grow until it shines like the dawn. Remember too the words of John’s Gospel: “…The light shines in the darkness and the darkness did not overcome it.” The darkness of our world has never, does not now, and will never overtake the love and light of God. PERIOD. This week I have seen the light as people came together to support one another in grief over the loss of our beloved parishioner Katie Thomas. I have seen the light as we gathered to sing and show a better way of peace and love at the federal building on Tuesday at noon. I have seen the light as I travelled to Grants Pass to be with the priest who baptized me, prepared me for confirmation and supported me in my priestly discernment, the Rev. Jim Boston as I anointed him and prayed with him and his wife Pam. I have seen the light.

The prophet Isaiah tells us how to shine light, how to shine so that people see our good works and give glory to God. “…Loose the bonds of injustice, let the oppressed go free, break every yoke, every thing that holds people down, share your bread with the hungry, house the unhoused, clothe people, be reconciled and care for your kin. Then, then, you light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing spring up quickly, when you call out to God, God will answer, “Here I am!” and your light shall rise in the darkness and your gloom be like the noonday. The Lord will guide you and satisfy your needs in parched places, make your bones strong, you’ll be like a watered garden, like a spring of water that never runs out. Such beauty, such light, life, and restoration Isaiah describes for us and our world when we shine bright with God’s love.

My siblings in the light of Christ, SHINE! Be the light of Christ in our broken and desperate world today. When we come to be with one another in grief, we shine and our light grows. When we come together to pray and praise and be fed at the table, we shine. When we stand and sing and hold signs and decry injustice, we shine. TOGETHER we shine. We need each other. I need your light. I share my light and I combine it with yours and on and one we go. We need one another’s’ light. Together we must shine the light that will change our world. Light that will usher in God’s dream of love and equity for all.

This little light of mine, I’m gonna’ let it shine (3x)

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

Amen.

These past few weeks, we have been working our way through the opening of Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians.

In today’s installment, Paul asks a question that always piques my interest: “Where is the debater of this age?” See, I used to do debate, sometimes called policy debate or cx debate, in high school and college, traveling all over the country to tournaments. So, when Paul talks about debaters, I notice.

His question here, however, is not a serious question. In the Roman world and the Greek world before it, debate was popular, all forms of oratory were. And all educated people, of which Paul is certainly one, would have been trained in the art of debate. Paul knows exactly where to go to find a debater in that age. No, this is not a serious question, it is a rhetorical question designed to mock. Ultimately, he is trying to set up an argument for why the faith we proclaim is better than the values of the world.

Debate is ultimately about wins and losses, and you are to strive for the wins. Victory and success. The whole point is to convince the audience or judge or judges that you are right and that your opponent is wrong. This was as true then; it still is today. In debate, there are winners and losers.

To win, to persuade people of your rightness, every debater would have used Aristotle’s three-fold approach to persuasion, found in the book Rhetoric. Everyone would have read this book in school, Paul most certainly read this book in school. In Rhetoric, Aristotle argues that you need to use some combination of your own ethos (your presence, expertise, position), the pathos of your audience (their worries, fears, anxieties), and your logos (your words, the carefully structured logic – logos/logic – the carefully structured logic of your words). Ethos, pathos, and logos.

But the logos Paul really cares about is not the logos of our arguments, but the Logos of God. Logos means Word. In the beginning was the Word, the Logos, and the Logos became flesh and lived among us. Paul points to the true Logos. Not the debater’s logos, not Aristotle's logos, but the true and ultimate Logos, the incarnate Logos, the incarnate Word: Jesus Christ.

And the image of the logos with which Paul starts the argument of this letter is the Logos hanging there on the cross. "The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved it is the power of God." This is counter to everything that the debater - of Paul's age, of our age, of every age - cares about. Losing instead of winning; failure instead of success.

The cross: that shameful tool of execution of the Roman State, designed to make a point to the whole body politic by publicly humiliating the victim. The cross: the ancient equivalent of the electric chair or the lynching tree or the gun used in a summary execution by an agent of the state on the street.

The Cross - this horrendous thing - is the foundation of true wisdom, true knowledge, true discernment, true boasting. The cross is the foundation of Paul's argument – remember we are just starting this letter, he is still laying the foundation for his argument that will unfold – the cross is the foundation of the argument that is going to take him into his wild claims later in the letter about what it means to be a follower of Jesus Christ, a baptized member of the Body of Christ - when he will claim that even the weakest, lowliest member is not only necessary, but often the most valuable - and his audacious claims about the primacy of love over every other gift.

This argument is an echo what Jesus proclaimed from the mountain that we heard in the Gospel today: blessed are the poor, the mourners, the meek, the hungry, the thirsty, the merciful, the pure, the peacemakers, the persecuted. Jesus lifts up the lowly and proclaims that they are blessed.

What kind of blessings are these? Certainly not blessings as the world understands blessing. These are not things that the typical debater is going to use as evidence of blessing. But these are the way of Jesus. These are the blessings of the way of the cross. "Foolishness to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved it is the power of God."

Winning is seductive. Success pulls at us constantly. Power is like the siren calling out to Odysseus. And yet, as Paul reminds us, winning, success, and power are nothing compared to God. The foolishness of God is greater than our wisdom; the weakness of God greater than our strength. Winning, success, and power are all useless in the light of the cross.

This argument is also an echo of Micah in our first reading trying to plead his case before the mountains. And yet, proclaim he must and proclaim we must, to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with our God.

What foolishness it is to do these three things in our world that seems to delight in injustice, to love meanness, and to run arrogantly from our God, run arrogantly as if we were God. All foolishness. But it is the foolish wisdom of God. And we have to keep proclaiming this foolish wisdom.

Keep proclaiming justice, kindness, and humility. Keep proclaiming the love taught in the words of the Beatitudes. Keep proclaiming the cross. These are the way of Jesus. Do not weary of this of this proclamation. Even as the world calls you foolish for prioritizing service over power, humility over arrogance, love over fear. Do not weary. For that power of God will carry you through to the end. Amen.

There is a thread through most of our lessons. Not in the Epistle, where there is a little insider stuff. The Epistle is rarely selected to match the other lessons, except on special days. Generally, we read through one of Paul’s Epistles, as we are working our way through 1st Corinthians now. The Epistle does not match the other lessons today, but the first reading, the Psalm, and the Gospel are selected to have at least one thread that connects them. There is a thread that is pretty clear in these readings today, and it is light.

As we heard in Isaiah, “the people who walked in deep darkness have seen a great light. Those who lived in a land of deep darkness, on them light has shined.” And in the Psalm we hear “The Lord is my light and my salvation. Whom then shall I fear?” And in the Gospel we heard Matthew quote Isaiah in a slightly different translation, “the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light. And for those who sat in the region and shadow of death, light has dawned.” We see this thread of light.

This is the same thread of light that we have been seeing for the last couple of months. During Advent and Christmas and Epiphany, this thread of light is there through these seasons. I like to call these three seasons “The Trinity of seasons of light” because there is this thread through all of them. In Advent we heard about the coming of the light, and we lit another candle on our Advent wreaths each week as we anticipated the coming of the Light. Then at Christmas we have the birth of the Light into this world. As we heard in the Christmas season from the prologue to John’s Gospel, “The beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. And all things came into being through Him. What came into being through Him was life, and the life was the Light of the world.” Jesus is the Incarnation of God’s light into this world.

And now in Epiphany, the light is going out into the world as various people in their epiphanies have the experience of seeing the Light. The Magi, people at Jesus’s baptism, the people at the wedding in Cana of Galilee, the Disciples and their calls, the healings and teachings of Jesus, are all moments in which people see this Light in their midst.

This thread of light isn’t just through these readings or just through these seasons. We see this thread of light through all of Scripture, from the beginning to the end. It is there in the very first chapter in the very first book in Genesis in the creation story. In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, the first thing that God said is, “Let there be light, and there was light, and it was good.”

That light continues on until the end of Scripture, the very last book. In the Book of Revelation we see the light again when God creates the New Heaven and the New Earth. There is no longer the greater and lesser lights, the sun and the moon. It is now the Lamb of God as the Light in the midst of the New Creation.

This thread of light keeps showing up all through Scripture. It is in the story of Moses’s call: he gets called from the light of a burning bush. As Moses is freeing the people from their enslavement in Egypt, they are led at night by a light, a pillar of fire. We this light in many of the Prophets, and we see it in Jesus: the prologue of John, and in today’s Gospel when Matthew frames Jesus’s ministry by saying he is the coming of the Light. And, of course, Jesus himself taking it to the next step: I have light, but you also have light, and let your light shine. This thread of light that we see through Scripture is from the beginning to the end, and all in between.

Why? Why is there this strong thread of light through all of Scripture? It is because the darkness has always been here. There has always been darkness in this world. Jesus himself was born into darkness, the darkness of empire that uprooted his family and made them, when Mary was nine months pregnant, go to another city. The darkness of them having to flee to Egypt as refugees because the thin-skinned King Herod tried to kill Jesus, and killed every little Hebrew boy in the effort to get Jesus.

We see the darkness in Jesus’s ministry. As Matthew said, he is coming into this darkness. What is that darkness? The darkness of people in Galilee being crushed under the oppression of an empire that is trying to extract all the wealth. Galilee is the breadbasket of the region. A lot of us have the image of the Holy Land as all desert, but that is not at all how it is. It is a varied geography, and Galilee is a gorgeous place with grass and plant and animal life. Orange trees are everywhere. It is an amazing region, and the empire was trying to extract all of the resources, and it was crushing the people. There is a great darkness that Jesus had come into.

The darkness is sill here today. It has been here through all of history. The darkness of grief at the death of a loved one, the death of a relationship, the death of a dream. All of us know the darkness of grief. The few people who don’t know about the darkness of grief have another darkness, which is a life tragically cut short. If you live you love, if you love you lose, if you lose you grieve, if you grieve you know about the shadow of death. There is a darkness always around us.

There is the darkness of injustice in the world, like the state execution of an innocent man. That was the story yesterday, and that was the story two thousand years ago when Jesus went to the cross. But what does the cross show us? The cross shows us that the darkness does not get the final word. The prologue to John that I quoted earlier, “The beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God. And all things came into being through Him. What came into being through Him was life, and the life was the Light of the world.” The next sentence is, “And the darkness did not overcome it.” Because the light of Christ, the light that God is shining in this world is more powerful than the darkness of death and despair. The darkness of grief and injustice do not have any thing on this light. It cannot put it out. The cross and the crucifixion are not the end of the story. The Resurrection is, and the light of Resurrection always gets the final word. In the midst of the darkness that we find in this life, God is trying to show us that there is a light, light to give us hope, light to shine a path on the way forward, a light so that we do not trip, a light so that we do not despair. Do not despair, my friends, of the darkness you see in this world. It has happened before, it will happen again, and in the midst of it is the Light.

Keep focused on the Light. Grieve, of course, we have to grieve. But do not let that grief overcome you. Do not fall into despair, but keep an eye on the Light and it will shine on the path out of it.

Look for that Light, and don’t forget the words of Jesus to shine the light yourself. You who have been baptized into the death and resurrection of the Incarnation of Light are meant to shine that light out into the world. As Dr. King said, “Darkness dues not drive out darkness, only light can do that.” In another point in that sermon when he talks about responding to hate with hate, he says that doing that is like adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars.

In the darkness, my friends, be the star. Be the light for somebody. Shine out the Light of Christ that is within you. Shine out the Light into this world so that people have hope, so people can see a path forward, and people can know that Light. Shine the Light, for the darkness does not get the final word. Only the Light of Resurrection does.

AMEN.

We don’t talk enough about the Psalms, so today we are going to talk about the Psalms. The Psalms are an important book in the Bible that are unlike any other. We read a Psalm every single week. It is the only book in the Bible that we do that with. We read a Gospel every week, but there are four of them to pick from. The Psalms, in their entirety, are found in the Book of Common Prayer. It takes up over 200 pages. It would be a lot thinner if we didn’t have the psalter in there. But we do because it is so important to our faith and to our worship.

The Psalms were important to Jesus. He quoted from them frequently, including on the cross. He very much understood his life in light of the Psalms. Many people throughout generations of the faith have found the Psalms the center of their spiritual life. Almost every monastic community, if not every single one of them, puts the Psalms in the center of their worshiping life. They have various cycles of how often they will read the Psalms that go anywhere from once a month to once a day. Can you imagine reading all the Psalms every single day? The Psalms are unique and special. They are sometimes called “the prayer book of the Bible.”

The Psalms also have a different place within the canon. We generally say that Scripture is about God speaking to us, that we are meant to hear the word of God through Scripture. That is a complicated sentence that we can’t unpack today. But we will say that generally God is speaking to us through Scripture. The Psalms have some element of that, but more than anything else, it is about us speaking to God. In the Psalms we will find people bringing the full range of emotion and experience to that conversation with God, from the lowest lows to the highest highs, from moments of elation and joy and celebration down to moments of despair and anxiety and fear and anger.

There is a group of Psalms called Imprecatory Psalms which are all about violence and bringing vengeance on people. Those are not meant to be a moral model for us, they are not aligned with God’s dream of a reconciled world. We don’t read them on Sunday, but they are there and they show us that we can bring our full selves, even those messy bits, to God. We don’t need to hide any of it from God. Every moment of frustration, anger, and doubt we can bring to God, just as the Psalms do.

The lead singer of the band U2, Bono, wrote an introduction to the Psalms in a book a couple of decades ago. He said that the Psalms are like the blues. If you know the blues, you know the Psalms, and you know Bono is on to something.

Our Psalm today is Psalm 40. Speaking of U2, there is a song called “Forty”, which is based on this Psalm. Psalm 40 begins by talking about this moment of despair, very low moments that the Psalmist has been through. It talks about it in the past tense, it talks in terms of having gotten out of it. So it is a celebratory way to talk about it, but in the way the Psalmist talks about it, we know it was a very low moment of despair, a moment of mire and clay, a moment of being in a desolate pit, and then being pulled up on to the highest cliff with sure footing. It must have been really bad, whatever the Psalmist went through.

In the very first line it says, “I waited patiently upon the Lord,” and I think it is a most misleading translation. It sounds like I’m patient, everything is fine, God can take all the time he wants because I’m a patient person. But that is not what this means. It is not what the Hebrew says. What we have here is a waiting that is very deep. One translation reads, I waited and waited and waited. I think that is a good translation.

The word patient also a sense of hope to it. The Jewish Publication Society translation says “I hope in the Lord,” which is a better translation than “I waited patiently.” Personally, I think we should translate it “I waited in hope for the Lord,” because it would bring out both elements of waiting and hope, although it doesn’t quite get to the depth of it. My preferred translation is “I hope beyond hope.” I think it gets to the depth of what the Psalmist felt, and God pulled the Psalmist out of that.

An interesting thing happens in Verse 5. “Great things are they that you have done, O Lord, my God,” and we think the Psalmist is talking about the great things that God did for him in the first four verses. But then it says “How great your wonders and your plans for us.” The Psalmist makes the transition from the individual experience of God pulling him up out of the desolate pit with its mire and clay, to understand it in a larger story of the ways that God has pulled God’s people out of mire and clay and set them on sure footing. The Psalmist is grounding the experience he has had in the greater story of salvation, the greater history of salvation that we read in Scripture. He is talking about the hope beyond hope that Sarah and Abraham had and the promise to give them a child. He is talking about the hope beyond hope that Jacob and his family had during the famine, and suddenly a long lost son and brother is able to pull them in, save them, and bring them into Egypt. Generations later, there is hope beyond hope in their enslavement when they were crying out to God for eighty years before Moses was sent. A hope beyond hope that God is faithful and true. And God comes through and pulls them out of the mire and clay of their enslavement, and brings them into the high, sure, safe ground of the Promised Land.

It is not just pulling out, but having the experience in life of going back and forth. We have many moments of mire and clay in the history of salvation, and in our own lives. But God is there in all of them, constantly working to bring us up out of it in alignment with his dream for this world.

I’m a little disappointed in the Lectionary reading for stopping at Verse 12 of this Psalm, because it makes it sound like all the bad stuff happened in the past and the good stuff is now. But Verse 13 of this Psalm says “for innumerable troubles have crowded upon me.” The rest of the Psalm is talking about how he is back in the mire and clay, and is again crying out to God to bring him up out of it. Back and forth.

It is the same for us in our lives, whether individual lives and individual mire and clay we find ourselves in, but also for us as a community. It is the same thing. We have moments of mire and clay, and yet God is in the midst of it bringing us up out of it. The Psalmist is doing an amazing thing as he keeps one eye on the past to remember the goodness of the Lord, keeping one eye on the future, knowing in hope beyond hope that God will come through, not sitting back waiting patiently. In the great depth of despair there is still the height of that hope that the Psalmist knows because he is keeping his eye on both the past and the future. He invites us to do the same.

Tomorrow is Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. day, and we can look at his story and see that he understood his life in the same way as the Psalmist. His life and work, and the struggles that he engaged in were part of this bigger story of mire and clay that the people of God have always found themselves in. Dr. King help hope beyond hope that there is a better way, a beloved community that he was proclaiming, that God’s dream for this world was something that could be realized and something that he could help proclaim. One eye on the past, one eye on the future. In all of Dr. King’s work, he understood that God is faithful, and God’s dream is sure, and we can trust in it.

One interesting thing about all these stories of mire and clay and God’s assurance that he will pull us out of it, is that it never seems to go in our time frame. Abraham and Sarah had to wait twenty-five years or so before their promise was realized. Eighty years between the birth of Moses and when he was finally sent, even though people were crying out that entire time. Forty more years in the wilderness. Hundreds of years on the issue of racial justice in this country, trying to create a beloved community, and we’re still not there. It is not on our time frame. Whatever challenges we are facing right now, it is not in our time frame. But God is in it. God is working to bring us up out of it.

So, my friends, do not despair. We have been there before, and God is with us. God is in the midst of it, and God, who is faithful and true, just and loving, is stooping down and hearing our cry. We will be taken up on that high cliff with a sure footing.

Keep one eye on the past to know the history of God’s faithfulness, and keep one eye on the future, hoping beyond hope.

AMEN.

Let us pray: Come Holy Spirit, speak to us of our beloved status and new life of grace in Jesus Christ your son. Amen.

I love this story of the baptism of Jesus and it’s one that I often share with people who are struggling to find worth or forgiveness. In today’s gospel Jesus comes to be baptized by John. At first, John protests, but Jesus insists and John baptizes him in the river Jordan. And just as Jesus is coming up out of the water the heavens break open and the Holy Spirit comes down like a dove fluttering above Jesus’ head. And the voice of God speaks: “This is my son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.” In this scene we have all of the members of the Trinity assembled. Jesus coming up out of the water, the Holy Spirit coming down and resting on Jesus, and the voice of the parent and creator God affirming, claiming, and assuring Jesus. What’s so powerful about Jesus’ baptism and this amazing Trinity moment, is that it’s an example and prototype for each and every one of us.

I LOVE baptisms. They’re such joyous events, aren’t they? Welcoming a new member into the body of Christ on this earth, the church. Happy family and friends, smiles, pictures, candles, maybe even tears of joy. The prayer just after baptism has a lot to say about what’s going in the sacrament of baptism:

Heavenly Father, we thank you that by water and the Holy Spirit you have bestowed upon these your servants the forgiveness of sin, and have raised them to the new life of grace. Sustain them, O Lord, in your Holy Spirit. Give them an inquiring and discerning heart, the courage to will and to persevere, a spirit to know and to love you, and the gift of joy and wonder in all your works. Amen. (Prayer after baptism, B.C.P., p. 308)

At out baptism we receive the Holy Spirit. At our baptism we receive forgiveness of our sins. At our baptism we receive the grace of God.

Just after the baptism we welcome the newly baptized with these words:

We receive you into the household of God. Confess the faith of Christ crucified, proclaim his resurrection, and share with us in his eternal priesthood (B.C.P., p. 308)

Welcome! You’re a part of God’s family, the Christian community. Together, with us, trust in the power of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. Join in sharing God’s love forever. Did you notice the verbs here? Confess, proclaim, join. These are all commands. Ok, here we go, join us, it’s time to get to work.

In the back of the prayer book, starting on p. 845 is An Outline of the Faith commonly called the Catechism. Page 858 lays out for us the amazing transformation that takes place at baptism. I invite you to turn to page 858 with me now…

Q. What is Holy Baptism?

A. Holy Baptism is the sacrament by which God adopts us as his children and makes us members of Christ's Body, the Church, and inheritors of the kingdom of God. We are adopted by God. The Creator of the universe has invited us to be full members of the family with all the rights and privileges of membership. We are inheritors of the amazing dream that God has in store for all of humankind. Through our baptism with water, in the name of the Father, and the Son and the Holy Spirit, we also receive spiritual grace.

Q. What is the inward and spiritual grace in Baptism?

A. The inward and spiritual grace in Baptism is union with Christ in his death and resurrection, birth into God's family the Church, forgiveness of sins, and new life in the Holy Spirit. (From the Catechism/Outline of the Faith, B.C.P., p. 858)

In our baptism we are united with Jesus in his death AND in his resurrection. With him we conquer death, like him, NOTHING, not even death, can separate us from the love of God. In baptism we are adopted, forgiven, and filled with the gift of the Holy Spirit to guide, comfort, and accompany us. There is a rarely used prayer for a baptism NOT followed by Eucharist, that sums it up quite well.

All praise and thanks to you, most merciful Father, for adopting us as your own children, for incorporating us into your holy Church, and for making us worthy to share in the inheritance of the saints in light; through Jesus Christ your Son our Lord, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (B.C.P., p. 311).

I encourage and invite any of you who are considering baptism for yourselves or for a child, grandchild or other relative, to reach out to me or to Bingham to schedule a time for preparation for this amazing celebration. In the church year, Lent is a great time for baptism preparation and the Easter vigil or the Easter season are great times for baptisms. For those who are already baptized, I remind you that the anointing with the Holy Spirit and the words of God to Jesus are also for you. When you or someone you know is feeling down, feeling like they’re not enough, beyond forgiveness, not worthy to be welcomed or loved, nowhere to belong …these words are for us, ALL of us:

You are my child, my beloved, with you I am well pleased. The God of love, who is love, speaks these words to us again and again. Can you hear them and take them into your heart? You are my child. I know you. I love you. I claim you. You are mine, now and forever. When I think of you, I smile. When I think of you, I am ever so proud.

I close with a poem from author Kate Bowler:

A Blessing for What’s True about You

by Kate Bowler

When God thought you up, it was a good day,

a lovely dream realized in God’s imagination,

a celebration from before you were born.

You were made out of God’s overflowing love,

in who you were, and are, and would become.

God saw it all, from way before the beginning, ‘til way past the end.

And saw that it was good.

This one, God said, this one I love.

I delight in the beauty, and the promise,

the wonder and the glory that is this one whom I have made.

And my gaze is ever upon them,

constant, and warm like the sun at golden hour,

gentle as starlight, transforming and continuing,

calling forth all the growing, all the becoming that is to be done.

Remember this truth:

You were made by love, for love, to love.

Amen.

Today is the first Sunday of Advent, the first Sunday of the new Church Year. It is the first Sunday of our annual journey through Jesus’s life, from his birth, ministry, death, resurrection, and ascension, on to Pentecost, when the Holy Spirit came down upon the Apostles and then sent them, and us, as the Body of Christ out into the world to be Christ’s loving hands and heart.

We go through this journey of the first part of Jesus’s life so we can pattern our own lives on his and better be the Body of Christ. The first steps of this journey more properly belong on Christmas, when we celebrate his birth. That is when his life began, after all. So what are we doing in Advent? Why is this the start of the new Church Year?

This short four-Sunday season of Advent, which is three and a half weeks this year, is a season of preparation for the journey. It is always wise to prepare for any journey. We need to get our tickets, line up our lodging, pack our bags, throw in a couple of changes of clothes and any medication, find a good book to read, and anything else we might need for a successful trip. Whether this journey is a hike or a car ride, a train trip or airplane flight, or a boat voyage, we also need to throw in our pack some good snacks to keep us well nourished.

Of course, our liturgical journey, our journey with Christ through his life, is not literal. It is a spiritual journey, and Advent is a time to prepare spiritually. While the preparations we do in Advent are things like getting the Christmas tree up and trimmed, hanging the lights, baking the cookies, wrapping the presents and so forth, Advent is also, and I would suggest more importantly, a time for us to fill our spiritual baggage with all that we need for this journey through Jesus’s life, to prepare our souls to grow with Christ this year.

One of the items that Advent gives us to throw into our pack for the journey is some rich and meaningful Scripture readings. There are certainly some great Psalms, Epistles, and Gospels, like we heard today, but I encourage you to pay extra close attention this season to the first reading from Isaiah every week. We will hear from Isaiah every week of Advent this year. Make sure that you pack those readings into your luggage.

Isaiah lived in a time of great despair, and a time of great hope. These two things are not opposites. They are related to each other. I recently read a book on hope by a Korean-German philosopher, Byung-Chul Han, in which he argues that despair and hope go hand in hand like a mountain and a valley. They need each other, they create each other. The deeper the despair, the higher the hope we can have.

Isaiah lived in a time in which everything that he and his people thought about the world, their identity as a people, and their relationship to God had been uprooted. The temple, the center of their faith, was destroyed, and the people were sent to live in exile. This was the time the Psalmist would say we hung up our harps and wept. Into this time, God sent Isaiah for two purposes: to explain what happened and why they were living in this great despair, and to offer them hope. The explanation that Isaiah and almost all of the prophets gave for why they were in this situation, is pretty straightforward. They failed in the twin commandments to love God and love neighbor. These two commands are linked in creation, for where does the image of God reside but in your neighbor. As Genesis teaches us, every single person is made in God’s image. They had failed to worship God, and equally failed to honor the image of God in others. Their failures were especially acute around those who were suffering, the poor, the widow, the orphan, and many more.

And yet, Isaiah was also sent to offer hope. Out of the deepest despair can come the highest hope. They need each other, they create each other. And boy, did Isaiah have some lofty hopes that he shared in the depths of this despair. Like in today’s reading where Isaiah shows us God’s dream of peace in which the swords are turned into plowshares and the spears into pruning hooks. War doesn’t just end in this vision, but the weapons of war are transformed into tools of agriculture. That which once took life now gives life. The heights of these hopes can reveal the depths of the despair, and throughout the weeks ahead we will see how deep the despair was when we hear some of the wild visions of hope that Isaiah had. We will hear of God’s dream of vegetarian lions, and Isaiah will share about the predator and the prey resting peacefully in each other’s presence. It is a radical transformation of this world’s order.

We will hear of the miraculous healing of people, and the transformation of barren landscapes from death into life. And we will hear of leaders who are not strong and mighty, but gentle and lowly like children. In fact, we will hear of one Child in particular whom we have come to understand and to know as the one humbly born in a stable and placed in a manger among the straw and the animals. Born to more than lead us, he was born to nourish us with his very body in a holy and divine life.

While this dream, this vision, this hope is partially realized in the birth, life, death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, it does not take much looking around to realize that it has not been fully realized. We still live far from the dream. But the thing about hope is that it is like dawn, the period every morning when the sun hasn’t yet risen, but the light is beginning to peek up over the horizon. Hope looks to the horizon and sees the light that precedes the sun’s rise.

I used to run a lot, but I’m out of the habit, although Ryan is working hard to get me back into it. But back in the day when I used to run a lot, my favorite time to run was early in the morning, starting while it was still dark before dawn, then running through dawn until the sun rose. Often a line from Psalm 57 was repeating in my head like a mantra, “wake up my spirit, awake, lute and harp. I myself will waken the dawn.” Dawn is a beautiful anticipatory moment of what could be when the day isn’t quite here, and it holds all of the day’s potential. For me, running at dawn was a great moment of hope, a moment of what a full, complete, and thriving life could be.

How much more is Isaiah’s great vision? A dawn not of the daily return of the light radiating from our solar system’s star, the sun, but the dawn from the light of Christ, and the peaceable Kingdom that it illuminates. Isaiah offers hope to us by sharing God’s dream of what this world could be like. He shares his hope out of the depths of his people’s deepest despair, and continues to share that hope with the depths of our despair today. Even if it feels like the entire world has been turned upside down, our identity destroyed, and our relationship and understanding of God has been shaken, there is still hope. And hope opens the imagination to see new possibilities.

So get ready for Advent. Get ready for this Advent, my friends. Prepare yourself for the journey. Pack your bags, and don’t forget to throw in Isaiah’s vision of God’s dream into your pack. You will want to read, learn, mark, and inwardly digest it as we go on this journey with Christ. As you more fully pattern your life on His this year, you can help waken the dawn and move one step closer to that moment of the realization of the hope of God’s dream.

AMEN.

Let us pray: O God who makes us your children and heirs of eternal life, send your Holy Spirit today speak of the great mystery and joy of resurrection. In the name of the Holy and Undivided Trinity, One God. Amen.

Today’s gospel reading continues a series of religious leaders trying to catch Jesus and trick him into saying something they can use against him. Not surprisingly, it doesn’t work, again. Jesus takes their ridiculous question and turns it into a teachable moment. From the beginning, the Sadducees question is bogus. They pose a question about resurrection life and relation to Mosaic law, but they don’t evn believe in the resurrection! Umm, so you guys have a question about how something you don’t believe in will work, ok. It’s true that a part of Mosaic law gave a prescription for a brother to marry his sister-in-law. While complicated to say the least, and quite foreign to us in this time and hemisphere, it did serve the purpose of caring for widows and carrying on family lines and inheritances in this patriarchal system. With no husband and no male children, women had no real rights or means of support. But, for the Sadducees to come up with this scenario where brothers kept dying leaving no heirs and marriage after marriage happening, is a preposterous extreme.

And so how does Jesus handle this outlandish question about whose wife this woman will in the resurrection? What are you talking about? None of that is important! You’re asking the wrong question, he says. And then Jesus proceeds to lays out for them the nature of God, and resurrection life. He explains there is no such thing as marriage in the resurrection. Marriage is an earthly thing NOT an eternal life, resurrected body thing. In the resurrection, like Jesus and thanks to Jesus, we have conquered death. As Jesus says, we cannot die anymore because we are like angels, children of God, and children of the resurrection. He goes on to declare that God is NOT the God of the dead, but of the living. These earthly bodies and earthly relationships, the powerful and wonderful loving relationships shared by some partners, will be eclipsed. Through Jesus Christ, the perfectly divine human example of love, our bodies and relationships, the way we are able to live and love will be transformed into a state that surpasses our human, earthly capability to comprehend. Crazy, right?

Remember these words from the prophet Isaiah:

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.

For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9).

We rarely talk about the resurrection or eternal life. But it seems quite appropriate this month when we celebrate All Saints and All Souls. As we look around the sanctuary and see the physical reminders, names and photos of loved ones who’ve died. This Great Cloud of Witnesses surrounds us, encourages us and shows us they way to life. And someday, we will be with them in everlasting joy, surrounded by the light and love of God’s presence within, all around and in between us. What an amazing vision!

During our Wednesday morning bible study this week, we tried to understand this scripture together. We wondered and struggled with the idea that those of us who are married or who had been married, might not experience this same relationship with our partners in heaven as this scripture says. But we also wondered about what possible new, unimagined form of love, as of yet unbeknownst to us, we might experience. Could it be a different level of intimacy, love, and joy that we’ve only glimpsed here on this earth? Yes, I think so. I think Jesus is telling the Sadducees and us, that there will be life, love, and joy beyond our wildest dreams.

In John’s Gospel Jesus proclaimed to Martha: “I am the resurrection and the life. Those who believe in me, even though they die, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25-28).

Our lives, caught up together with Jesus, will never end. We, like Jesus, will be resurrected. These human bodies will be transformed. Every Sunday we say together in the Nicene Creed: “… We look for the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come” (BCP, p. 358). Jesus is the model for us of life, death, and resurrection. When we are baptized, we are baptized into his life, death, AND resurrection. Just as Jesus was raised from the dead, so will we be raised again.

In our collect for All Saint’s Day, we pray: Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you (BCP, p. 245). Indescribable, unimaginable, marvelous, wonderful, breathtaking, staggering, astounding, astonishing, amazing joys, are what await us and our loved ones in the resurrection. It’s not clear what our lives will be like after we die. Some have tried and continue to try to explain or paint pictures based on scripture. But we can’t, we just can’t know. It’s not in our human capacity. And yet, we CAN wonder in awe and imagine what it will be like. God is love. God made us to be in loving relationship. It stands to reason that when our lives on this earth are over, we will enter into the most amazing, perfect form or relationship with God, humankind, and creation beyond our imagination! I don’t know what my resurrection body and life and relationships will be like. But I DO know that they will be amazing and wonderful and love soaked. And in that I take hope and for that I give thanks to God.

Amen.